Peach Pancakes

Oh no, summer is not over yet. I've been waiting, only somewhat patiently, for the local peaches to ripen and that time is finally here. My mom used to make peach pancakes when I was growing up and the taste takes me right back to childhood summers. We are visiting my mother and my sister's family in Idaho for Labor Day Weekend. This has become an annual road trip over the past several years and this year is extra special because it is the first time we are meeting my new niece Evelyn! 

First thing on our first morning, Mary Ellen made peach pancakes for us, which we ate slathered with butter and sprinkled with sugar in her lovely and shady backyard. These taste even more delicious when you have a sweet baby on your lap making little newborn mewings and sighs.

Our husbands then took themselves off on their own adventures for the weekend, so my mother, sister and I are having rare girl time to play with the kids, go to the farmer's market, attend a pig roast, play three-handed cribbage and just laugh and chat.

Yesterday we picked up another flat of perfectly ripe peaches from Tonnemaker's Farm at the Moscow Farmer's Market in order to make more peach pancakes. I love this small town market where we run into my sister's friends, play at the playground, dance to the band and stroll with the community.

We had more peach pancakes this morning and I daresay we will be having them the next two mornings also. Here is the recipe my sister uses and my mother approves. Note: You may want to double or triple the recipe. Trust me.

Peach Pancakes

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup milk

1 egg

1 T. baking powder

2 T. sugar

1/4 t salt

3 T. coconut oil

Mix all ingredients together and add fresh diced peaches to the batter.

Another fun recipe that I want to try is the mini peach pies from my cousin Jessica's blog, although I may be too lazy this weekend.

And because he captures the joy of biting into a fresh peach so well, I give you poet Li-Young Lee on peaches:

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward   

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into   

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

~ Li-Young Lee

A New Family Heirloom

When I was a kid, I used to gaze in awe and envy at the art hanging in my best friend Anne's home. Her grandmother painted three beautiful life-size portraits of Anne and her two brothers as young children, maybe age 4 or 5. The paintings seemed so romantic and old-fashioned and very, very special. They made Anne and her brothers seem extra important and adored. I wanted someone to paint me. Looking back, I guess that was the spark that fanned my love of great portraiture and I've always been drawn to the work of John Singer Sargent, Edouard Manet, Thomas Gainsborough and Ingres. I love to imagine the inner thoughts of their subjects, now-long-gone, looking straight back at me from their frames. If I had lived one hundred years ago and had loads of money, I would have sat for a portrait at eighteen or before my wedding or with my family and hung the portrait over our grand fireplace. This is the same part of me that as a bookish and romantic child wanted to have a coming out ball, go away to boarding school and summer on the French Riviera - none of these normal things for a girl growing up in South Dakota.

But now that I am an adult with my own son, I can have his portrait painted. I've been looking for someone to capture his spirit in a style I like. I found that someone in the Ukraine thanks to Etsy and her name is Inna, aka Miss Black Eyes. In this day and age of digital photography, it is easy to send a jpeg file half-way around the world to a talented artist who can take her time to paint an energetic 2-year-old who would never be still enough for an actual sitting. 

Thank you, Inna, for turning this photograph of my son...

...into this beautiful oil portrait!

I can't wait to have Inna paint a portrait of my daughter, due to join our family in October, to hang next to this in two years time. These will be our new family heirlooms.

Like A Definition Of Love

We have arrived home in Seattle and it is hot here. Well, relatively hot. Hot for the Pacific Northwest. Windows are thrown open, we don't turn on lights and we can barely sleep with sheets on. No one in this part of the world has air-conditioning and we only need fans maybe this one week of the year. It doesn't help to be 31 weeks pregnant. I'm feeling nostalgic for the white house with green shutters where I grew up, which had a wrap-around upstairs sun porch off my parents' room. We'd ro-sham-bo to sleep in the canopy bed out there in the summers. Soft breezes would rustle the leaves on the trees, drift through the big screen windows and lull you to sleep. Even better was sleeping out there during a big old midwestern summer thunder storm (I miss those too). Ruth Stone's poem below taps into that childhood memory and melds with the everything-is-right-in-the-world-feeling I have now when my sleeping son is curled up against me. Isn't it amazing how another person's poem, someone else's very specific experience, can hurl you beautifully back into your own life? 


Green Apples

In August we carried the old horsehair mattress
to the back porch
and slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard
telling me something:
saying something urgent.
I was happy.
The green apples fell on the sloping roof
and rattled down.
The wind was shaking me all night long,
shaking me in my sleep
like a definition of love,
saying, this is the moment,
here, now.

~ Ruth Stone

All the World Can Hold Quite Still

This has possibly been my best-ever summer. I'm quite sure Xavier would say the same. We've been on a six-week island-hopping holiday in the Salish Sea with many friends and family joining us throughout. Beach-combing, tide-pooling, crabbing, canoeing, swimming, picking raspberries, throwing rocks, hiking, biking, and drawing train tracks in the sand have all been daily activities. Xavier has been having a ball chasing after his older cousins and friends. All the playing, fresh sea air and sunshine has been exhilarating and exhausting too, but every day we take quiet time for naps in the hammock, beach walks at low tide and sitting on Nan's Bench watching for whales.

And each day, I try to pause at some point to take a deep breathe and hold quite still. The above illustration is from one of Xavier's (and my) favorite summer books, All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon.

We are wrapping up our time on Gabriola Island, one of the Gulf Islands off Vancouver. This is a special place for us as we've been coming here for six of the past eight summers.  Christian flew with me here on a sea plane for our third date (he was clearly trying to impress me and it definitely worked). We came here to honeymoon after our summer wedding with my two brothers and their families. It was here that we found out we were pregnant the first time, with the baby we lost before Xavier.  Christian's entire family has gathered here two summers, with plans to for more reunions. All this thanks to our great friends Dave and Susan from Vancouver, who share their beach house with us.  The cottage itself, called Gabreeden, is a charming and rustic cabin with an outhouse, no dishwasher or laundry, but it has a wood stove for cool evenings, two kayaks, crab pots and a million dollar view. The following photo was taken by Dave this past weekend of me, Xavier and their four-year-old son James, a beautiful reminder to hold quite still.

A Library Collection

I am in a very special spot in the world, Lopez Island yes, but more specifically the Lopez Island Library. This little library in a community of 2400 is a five-star rated library, a prestigious ranking from the Library Journal. One of only two in the state to receive this distinction, the other one has an annual budget of $30+ million while the library here on Lopez has less than $400,000.

This week we attended the Lopez Island Library's 34th Annual Teddy Bear Picnic. Since his teddy bears are back at home, Xavier took Peter Rabbit as his guest. We've been attending story time on Wednesdays while on the island and it is one of the best place to feel like a local. I like to peek in libraries to get a sense of a community and I have a few favorite libraries in the world. Some are grand, some cozy, but all very magical. Over the years, I have collected them like gems.

In the beginning, there was the Bookmobile that parked down the street from my house in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on Tuesday afternoons. At the main branch of the library I was allowed to check out framed art by the likes of Renoir for my bedroom walls in addition to books.

Then there was my library, the one I lovingly organized in my basement when I was in grade school.  I spent a week categorizing my family's books and made library cards for my friends. I don't think I ever officially opened the library, I just had such fun cataloging it. Sometimes I think I missed my calling.

During my Rotary Youth Exchange year in Turkey I visited Ephesus where the Library of Celsus is the most intact surviving ancient library in the world. I could hear the whooshing of robes and patter of soft voices from ghosts of patrons and scholars here.

I spent a lot of time studying and daydreaming in the Bapst Art Library while I was at Boston College, which ranks first on this list of Most Beautiful Campus Libraries. Just walking into this library made me feel smarter and infused with the wisdom of the ages.

I fell madly in love with Thomas Jefferson at his library at Monticello.

Like millions of others, I also have a special place in my heart for the New York Public Library's two pink Tennessee marble lions, Patience and Fortitude.

If one happens to be very pregnant and not skiing, one can spend a snowy day curled up in an armchair with a pile of books at the Whistler Library in British Columbia. This reading room was mentioned on this list of Incredible Reading Rooms Around the World.

In Europe, I've walked in awe through the Melk Abbey Library in Austria, the Vatican Library and the Trinity College Library in Dublin. In Portugal, Christian and I had the Biblioteca Joanina at the University of Coimbra all to ourselves and watched tiny bats ruffle the air as they flew about. We just recently visited the Wren Library in Cambridge where I was thrilled to come across A.A. Milne's handwritten manuscript for Winnie-the-Pooh. (A fun side note: Maggie Wren Crume, the infant daughter of my friend Catherine is named after Christopher Wren, this architect ancestor in their family tree and her name is doubly symbolic as they are also a birding family).

On the other end of the spectrum from royalty-funded libraries, when Christian and I traveled to Vietnam we raised money to donate a mobile library for poor rural schools through GoPhilanthropic and Global Village Foundation. We personally presented the children with a library of 250 books, half in Vietnamese, half in English at a special all-school assembly. It was definitely a highlight of our trip.

Back in Seattle Rem Koolhas sparked controversy with his design for the downtown public library (the other five-star library in Washington with a very healthy budget), but I like it. However I spend more time at our neighborhood Carnegie branch in Greenlake which I frequent on a weekly basis. There I can check out more books about beautiful libraries in the world such as...

• Libraries photographed by Candida Hofer
• The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World by Jacques Bosser
• The Library: A World History by James W. P. Campbell

Happy Summer Reading!

Evelyn All Brand New

My new niece is born! My older brother's family is here with us on the island and after hearing the happy news last night we all went down to the beach with a bottle of wine to watch the Super Moon rise over the water and toast our sister and her new daughter. This morning I sat on the deck in the morning sun and wrote a little occasional poem to commemorate her birth.


Evelyn All Brand New

Bringer of great happiness,

radiant little Evelyn

all brand new,

you chose a fragrant July evening

to arrive, rising to the world just

before the Super Moon,

illuminating this bright world

even more.

Add your light

to the sum of light,

wrote Leo Tolstoy (someone

you will want to read later and

we can discuss over tea and sugar

cookies). You have already

accomplished this in your first

hours, radiating joy

to all of us

who already love you

with the kind of love

perfectly impossible to quantify.

The light-heartedness you must

feel after the long journey, blinking

your brilliant eyes in the

sun of your first morning. As you

taste the air, touch your mother’s

skin, listen to your father and sister

coo over you, just think of 
all the summertime adventures 
ahead -

cousins to chase,

raspberries to pick,

trees to climb,

lakes to swim,

rocks to skip.

You bright summer star,

all the world beams
back at you.

Manifesting Lopez Island

We've all heard the stories: the struggling writer who wrote himself a check for $1 million as motivation and inspiration...and then a publisher gave him that exact amount as an advance on his book. Or the woman who made a collage of her dream home from magazine clippings...and shortly thereafter walked into that house with her realtor and bought it. I love these stories. In fact, it makes me want to sit down and make a vision board right now.

I do actually know some people who have manifested things on a grand scale. My friend Catherine had gone through a string of unsatisfactory boyfriends and so, on her sister's advice, had cleared a small drawer to give space for someone special to come along. She put in a few symbolic things, including a map of New Mexico, a place she had a desire to visit. Within a matter of weeks, a handsome man appeared on the scene who, it just so happened, had grown up in New Mexico. Now they are happily married with two beautiful children.

My friend Julie finished grad school and sat down to make a vision board of her dream job. She ended up getting two job offers, both of which she was able to accept due to the projects involved and together they covered everything she wanted. She is one of those rare people who really loves her job(s). Apparently this thing about telling the universe what you want really does work.

Perhaps I'm here on Lopez Island at this very moment because I voiced the longing to be here and, as they say, "gave it up to the universe." Last summer Christian and I visited this island for the first time and ended up camping for a few blissful days. At the end of that trip, I said to him, "What if we could come back here for a month next year, or even all summer? Wouldn't that be wonderful?" Fast forward a few months and in November we had a lovely family inquire about renting our house for six weeks over the summer.  I immediately found the Wren's Nest for us, a light-filled house on the south end of the island...and now here we are on "our" island. Christian can work anywhere, I can write anywhere and Xavier is happy anywhere. The fact that this gets to be the anywhere at the moment is really pretty fantastic.

Hmmm, now what else shall we manifest? Time to whisper it to the breeze or shout it out from the mountaintops.